Category Archives: monsters

I have been boarded and scuttled by the pirates of Banko Merricka. Yes the blood-thirsty buccaneers have won their lawsuit against me and forced me into a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. You see, they ambushed me. When I was undergoing a debt reduction plan, the evil banker buccaneers of Banko Merricka not only refused to answer all calls from my lawyer, they quietly sold my debt to their ruthless debt collecting assassins, who waited until I had paid off all my other creditors, and then launched a lawsuit against me. They normally get away with this kind of ambush because people in general don’t know how to respond. I hired a lawyer and fought back. I would’ve been able to pay a settlement if it had occurred when I wasn’t dealing with a big financial hit from the city over the derelict swimming pool.

My Banko Merricka debt was boosted by a couple thousand dollars due to their court fees which I must also pay. It is a very expensive process for the average American to become bankrupt and poor. The kind of bankruptcy I will undergo bundles all my unpaid unsecured credit card debt into one huge pile and then, supervised by an account manager, I will pay it off in manageable chunks for the next five years. It wipes out all my credit accounts except car payments and reduces my ability to secure loans to zero. The pirates have won.

But I am not despairing. I haven’t been able to afford medicine and going to the doctor since I retired, so I will probably not live to pay it all off anyway. And money is not the focus of my life. The people who care about money more than life itself do not lead happier lives than I do. If we lose our house and have to move to an apartment, we can do that. If I have to get by on less each month, well, I’ve done that before. Money worries will not be the cause of my heart attack or stroke. And who knows, if I eat enough spinach, maybe there is super-power to fight back with in my future. Pirates don’t win every battle.

I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.

One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.

This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.

The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.

Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare

And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.

So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.

What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.

I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)

What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!

As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.

Kiss me, Baby!

Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.

You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.

So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.

I slept in this morning. Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies. I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties. I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.

When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa. It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am. I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory. And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon. It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast. I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.

It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero. Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite. And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was. Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness. When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved. And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night. Some movies were tragedies. Sometimes the hero didn’t win. Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end. I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry. And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy. You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear. You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door. The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.

Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again. What’s wrong with me? Am in my second childhood already? Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities? Of course I am. And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.

This is not a picture of Betsy DeVos. This is an orc used as a metaphor, something children will no longer learn how to use in the dark new future of education.

Orcs, as depicted by Tolkien in his epic work The Lord of the Rings, are an unhappy lot, hating everyone, especially themselves and their masters whom they serve only out of fear. Sound like modern-day Republicans? Well, that’s probably not a fair comparison. Shame on you for thinking like that. Although, I must admit, looking at the Secretary of Education that Donald Trump has foisted upon us with the aid of senate Republicans, there is probably good reason you might think that.

Orcs, according to Tolkien, create no beautiful things. They live out their lives violently destroying everything and everyone they touch. They are greedy, corrupt, disloyal, and generally the very definition of ugliness. And they have been the opponents of good public education for as long as I have been associated with schools and teaching.

Here is an actual portrait of DeVos. Sorry to spring something so foul and gut-wrenchingly horrible on you, but I thought you ought to have some idea how hideous this orcishness really is.

Orcs always tell me, “You can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at them.” What they really mean when they say this is either, “I can afford to put my kids in a good school that will only teach them what I want them to know, and I don’t think any of my money should be taken from me by taxation to pay for the education of poor people’s kids, especially not stupid poor people’s kids.” Or, more likely, “I am too dumb not to believe rich white people when they say the world will be better for me and mine if I let rich white people keep all the money they make and make all the money they want.” Either way, in Texas where the orcs have ruled since the Reagan Revolution first won over the rich white orcs that carry their orcish tribal banners all over oil-rich Texas, money has never been an issue for Texas public schools. There simply is no money for public schools in Texas. Over the past decade the State has always chosen to cut school funding before dipping into their vaunted billion-dollar rainy day fund whenever the Republican legislatures create a huge budget shortfall. And whenever there has been a budget surplus, education funds are not restored. Things like the fight against evil Planned Parenthood clinics take precedence.

Members of the Texas State Legislature

Now Betsy DeVos, who became our current Secretary of Education despite resistance from all non-orc members of the US Senate, plus two orcs, will now give the orc hordes everything they want for education. The federal Department of Education will be dismantled from the inside. Privatized for-profit schools will become the new normal and receive funding disproportionate to the work they actually do. All the cream belonging to rich folks will be skimmed off the top of the educational milk vat, and the rest will be left to fester and spoil in public school vats, becoming, at best, really really stinky cheese.

And so, let me end by saying, “Thank you, orcs, for doing such a wonderful job of protecting my children and grandchildren from the horrors of education and the ability to think for themselves. You have protected them from ever learning enough to pull themselves out of the poverty and slavish lives you have put them in.”

Yes, I am well aware that I am in the middle of an epic Shakespeare rant this week, explaining in the goofiest of terms the reason I believe Shakespeare is not Shaksper. But you have to mark a solemn occasion like the onset of the end-times. So I thought I might pay dissembling dreary lip service to the inauguration of a man who, if he appeared in the middle of a Dick Tracy episode, would be known as the villainous Cheeto-head.

You see, I don’t recognize this villain as the legitimate head of my government. So I won’t be using the title of “President” with this villain’s name. Instead, I intend to practice Shakespearian insults to get the bad taste out of my mouth on this horrible day resulting from the malfeasance of certain bad actors, a concerted effort to suppress the vote in key States like Florida, an inebriated campaign run by a dissolute, dissembling mountebank with a talent for misdirection, and a very unfortunate ill-timed collective brain fart on the part of masses of angry but somewhat intellectually limited white people. (No, I am not worried that they will get me for that last one. They don’t know what most of the words mean, and none of them would take the time to read this far through this post.)

The conflagration of Trumpkin Trolls on the internet have been telling me that they have endured eight years of Obama, and now I should just shut up and endure eight years of the Great Orange Face. But, swaggering lackwits, I say thee nay! This will not be an eight year reign. It will either be a zero-year tragedy extravaganza or a permanent reign until the bedeviled Fenris Wolf consumes poor over-wrought Thor on the terrible day know as Ragnarok. The spoiled bag of figgy pudding that is our new leader and golden king will have a lot to answer to St. Peter for. Um, or is that Mephistopheles?

I intend to hold the vicarious viscount of villainy accountable with my words and wit, meager as they may be. And I will decry everything he and the harpy DeVos will do to my beloved system of public education. I will probably also expire from the villainy of the wretched Republican pizzle drinkers who are busy disemboweling the health care system that has so recently kept me alive, but I will continue to testify to their perfidy until my last breath expires.

So, I guess I can bring an end to this venomous epistle satisfied that I have lectured ass-headed Bottom about having a donkey’s head on his shoulders in the most roundly Shakespearean way I could wrangle. Shakespeare, if he gave us anything of value, gave us to understand the true power of words. And it is by the application of powerful and true words we must battle this sanguine, self-satisfied snollygoster who can barely read and is crippled with a dysfunctional slow-working pate which he more often sits on than uses to think with.

This scary-faced man is the nutball known as David Icke. My essay today is not about him, but about his amazing conspiracy theory that puts to rest once and for all the notion that intelligent life exists on the planet Earth. His theory clearly shows that the correct answer to the notion is, “No, there is absolutely no intelligent life on the planet Earth.”

Seriously… this man believes there is a race of reptilian aliens living in the center of the planet Earth which is apparently hollow. But not content to live in the center of the Earth and kidnap people to eat, they morph into human form and replace world leaders and important humans with cold-blooded reptilian aliens. Queen Elizabeth of England is one. Both Presidents Bush are also aliens. He offers as proof that sometimes they begin to let their disguises drop and photos have been taken that reveal the true nature of these disguised individuals. Particularly if they are photographed or videoed poorly.

Or, you know, maybe the photos were altered slightly to bring out the change.

And you know that this theory must be true. David Icke has all those years as a soccer commentator to back up the validity of his analysis.

Anyway… I believe he is right. At least, metaphorically speaking. Many of the bad guys that keep winning against the odds and the interests of the American people are obviously cold-blooded lizards underneath. Especially Republicans.

Notice the simpering lizard grin. The self-satisfied smile of a blood-drinker who has recently slaked his thirst on the blood of other immigrants. He is elected by a State that is is largely made up of Hispanic immigrants, yet his idea of immigration reform centers around deportation and cruelty to people who nominally share the same cultural background as he does. He loves to eat machine-gun bacon, cooked on the hot barrel of an assault weapon that it is his sacred second-amendment right to own and to open carry. He is ever ready to stand his ground and shoot down anyone whom he might perceive as a threat, including, no doubt food-stamp-fed grandmothers and their children… or rather “Abuelas y nietos”. It is not hard to believe in his cold-bloodedness. And since he is obviously the darling of the Koch Brothers and other scions of the greedy right, it is easy to believe that he eats little children for breakfast. Or at least wants to take public assistance monies away from them to give it out in tax breaks to the wealthy corporate elites.

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

These lizard politicians have sympathy for no one but the wealthy and the powerful, most of which are also presumably lizard people. And now that the Trumpasaurus Rex has taken over the White House, the lizard people are going to feast, stripping the bones of the poor and the helpless, along with the ground meat from the withering middle class.

Does all of this nonsense about lizards scare you? If it doesn’t, it probably should. But none of it is my fault. If you have to blame someone… it’s David Icke’s conspiracy theory.